Inductivist

To answer this question, I calculated mean IQs for all self-described whites by the country they said their ancestors came from. Only people born in the US are included since immigrants are at a disadvantage on a vocabulary test (the measure of IQ used here). Here are the results:

Mean IQ

Africa  93.4
Mexico  90.0
Puerto Rico  93.2
Spain  97.2
American Indian  94.7
India  95.8
Other Spanish  95.9
American only  90.4

It looks like many of these people are racially mixed. They label themselves as white but often have some non-white ancestry. The mixed groups that do not have low mean IQs are self-described whites whose ancestors came from east Asian countries--Japan, China, or the Philippines. 

UPDATE: The mean IQ for self-described whites whose ancestors are from east Asia is 99.8. 

 

Sociology textbooks regularly state as if it were God's Truth that the United States is a fundamentally racist country. Let's try something different and instead of maligning a whole country, let's actually look at data.

Between 2010 and 2014, the World Values Survey asked 88,042 people from 59 countries if they would object to having neighbors of a different race.  Here are the percent who answered yes by country:

Percent objecting to a neighbor of a different race

Azerbaijan  58.1
Libya  55.1
Palestine  44.0
Thailand  39.7
Lebanon  36.3
Turkey  35.8
Ecuador  34.5
S. Korea  34.1
Yemen  34.0
Georgia  32.1
Armenia  31.8
Malaysia  31.3
Kuwait  28.1
Kyrgyzstan  28.1
Iraq  27.7
Jordan  27.2
India  25.6  
Estonia  25.4
Cyprus  24.8
Romania  23.5
Belarus  23.1
Japan  22.3
Philippines  21.6
Nigeria  20.9
Ghana  19.9
Algeria  19.8
S, Africa  19.2
Hong Kong  18.8

All Countries  18.6

Russia  17.2
Tunisia  16.9
Ukraine  16.9
Pakistan  15.7
Germany  14.8
Uzbekistan  14.0  
Morocco  13.8
Singapore  12.6
Kazakhstan  11.2
Slovenia  10.9
China  10.5
Mexico  10.2
Peru  9.3
Zimbabwe  8.9
Qatar  8.8
Taiwan  8.4
Netherlands  8.2
Haiti  6.3
Chile  5.6
USA  5.6
Poland  5.5
Australia  5.0
Spain  4.8
Rwanda  3.5
Colombia  3.2
New Zealand  2.9
Sweden  2.8
Brazil  1.9
Uruguay  1.6
Trinidad and Tobago 1.5
Argentina  1.0

So, in a sample of 59 countries, the United States is the 12th most tolerant. The percent of Americans not wanting a neighbor of another race is less than one-third the world average. Liberals should be ashamed of themselves for indicting our country. 

Whites in general are accused of being notoriously racist, but you can see that Western societies tend to be the most tolerant.  The most intolerant regions are Muslim and Asian.

I don't know if anyone has put forward the hypothesis in some formal way, but I have run across the idea that while mistreatment by whites is common among blacks generally, it's REALLY bad in areas with few blacks. The reasoning seems to be that whites are very racist everywhere, but concentrations of blacks are able to push back and suppress the discrimination to some extent. By contrast, isolated blacks are more powerless and consequently have it really bad.

The General Social Survey (GSS) asked blacks, "How much discrimination is there that hurts the chances of blacks to get good-paying jobs?" Since there were only 152 respondents, I took the nine regions used by GSS and collapsed them into two: one high-black and one low-black category.
I also divided up the country into North vs. South under the assumption that the South is more racist.

Answers ranged from "a lot of discrimination" (4) to "none at all" (1) so higher numbers indicate greater perceived discrimination. Here are the means:

Mean perceived job discrimination

North High Black  3.56
North Low Black   3.38
South  3.29

The region with the greatest perceived discrimination is made up of parts in the north that have the most blacks. Contrary to the stereotype, there is no evidence here that the South is more racist--it scores the lowest. In the middle are low-black areas in the north. When I say north, I mean the mountain states and the west coast as well as the north proper. (You don't see a low-black southern region because there is no such place in GSS data.)

So GSS data contradict the view that black communities that are small, isolated, and surrounded by many whites have it really bad. Blacks think they have it better when their numbers are small.

My guess would be that perceived discrimination is affected a great deal by exaggeration, a phenomenon that gets magnified among large concentrations of blacks.

UPDATE: This hypothesis of large numbers magnifying the perception of discrimination doesn't work for the South which has many blacks but scores the lowest on discrimination. A reader suggested that progressives encourage blacks to see mistreatment, but some low-black areas contain many liberals: the West Coast, New England, Minnesota. I wonder if the perception of bias depends on how one is treated when applying for a job. Southerners and perhaps many people in low-black areas might have a softer touch than employers in places like Chicago or Detroit. Discrimination is typically an ambiguous thing. People are not going to admit that they're not hiring you because they don't like blacks, so people have to rely on cues. A brusque manner could be interpreted as bias.

What are the patterns of inter-racial violence?

This report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics is an analysis of 2012-15 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data based on hundreds of thousands of American households. Victims of any kind of violence (assault/battery, robbery, rape) are asked about the specifics of the crimes committed, including the race and Hispanic status of offenders. Of course, we don't have data on homicides since "dead men tell no tales."

Adjusting for group size, I calculated the ratio of black-on-white crimes versus white-on-black crimes. Blacks are 6.3 times more likely to attack whites than the reverse.

Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely to commit some kind of violence against whites than whites against Hispanics.

Finally, blacks are 4.8 times more likely to assault Hispanics than vice-versa.

Elites always portray whites as the victimizers, but when it comes to rape, robbery, and assault (and murder which shows the same patterns) whites are most likely to be the victims, and blacks the perpetrators.

UPDATE: Looking at the numbers, what drives the large black-white difference is that despite the large numbers of whites in the population, their share of all black victimizers is small. Whites rarely attack non-whites. Their violence is confined mostly to other whites. 

In the last post, I showed that whites have a much lower rate of sex trafficking compared to other racial groups.  Now let's look specifically at child sex and labor trafficking.

The numbers shown below compare the rates of child sex trafficking by non-whites to that of whites:

Times more likely to engage in child sex trafficking than whites

Blacks   14.6
Hispanics   5.3
Asians   3.1
Others   2.9

While the racial differences are not as large here as they were with all sex trafficking, they are still striking.  All groups, especially blacks, are much more likely to traffic children.

Here are the differences for labor trafficking:

Times more likely to enslave workers than whites

Blacks   2.0
Hispanics   5.7
Asians   40.0
Others   83.0

The Asian/white gap is enormous and shouldn't surprise anyone. It's ironic that blacks are now two times more likely to enslave workers than whites. And look at "Others"--American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islanders, and persons of two or more races--the gap is giant.

White folks are just awful, aren't they?

One of the strongest findings in sociology is that people follow the principle of homophily--they naturally associate with people like themselves.  It goes without saying that sociologists never take the next logical step and conclude that this universal tendency is rooted in biology; that it is very resistant to change; that it's counterproductive to swim against a very strong tide. The typical view of a sociologist when it comes to a social universal is, "Yes, we see it everywhere, so naturally, we should get rid of it!"

Nowhere is this truer than in the case of race.  Around the entire globe, people of the same race tend to gravitate to each other, so in America, we're bound and determined to see the day when a random white person has all non-white buddies.

So how are we doing on this?  I looked at a question given in the General Social Survey where participants were asked to list friends (sample size = 1,300).  I assume that the first person mentioned is a close friend, if not the closest friend.  When the respondent is white, how often was the first friend mentioned black?  Two percent of the time.  Black respondents first mentioned a white friend 11.2% of the time.

If making friends were truly random, the distribution of friends would match the racial distribution of the population. (We'll set aside the goal of preferring friends from other races.)  For example, 13% of the first friends mentioned by whites should be black since blacks are 13% of the population.  But when I do the math that takes into account the size of the black and white populations, blacks are 37.1 times more likely to say their first-mentioned friend is black rather than white. A white is 9.3 times more likely to mention a white person.  I doubt the numbers were much different in 1960.

For all America's efforts, biology seems to be stronger than sociology.

This new study looked to see if polygenic scores for educational attainment that have been developed from samples of white people work for blacks (sample size = 1,050). A polygenic score sums up how many variations in locations on genes a person possesses that have been correlated with the outcome variable, weighted for the strength of the relationships. In plain English, the higher your score, the higher your genetic risk.

The researchers found that, even though blacks have a genetic history that is very different than whites, the polygenic scores that were developed for whites significantly predicted going to college among blacks. While scores did not predict reading achievement, they did predict math achievement.

Bottom line: genes matter. They matter for whites, they matter for blacks.   

We saw in the last post that religious blacks, compared to their irreligious counterparts, say their racial identity is more important to them.  Does this pattern apply to whites?

I suspect the General Social Survey question is not interpreted the same by whites as blacks. It asks about ethnic identity, and I would guess whites are more likely to respond with something like, "Sure my Irishness is important."  Only a certain percentage probably interpret the question racially.

Anyway, here's what we get when we calculate mean ethnocentricity scores by church attendance (N = 2,167):
















Being ethnocentric peaks for whites who attend 2-3 times per month.  By contrast, it bottoms out among those who never go to church AND those who go more than weekly.

Racially-minded whites often say that Christianity is a problem since it encourages color-blindism, but that only seems to be the case for the small share of highly religious people.  And the complete absence of religious activity is correlated with less ethnocentrism.  Moderate religiosity seems to go hand-in-hand with ethnic loyalty. 

By the way, the difference between the top and bottom group is roughly 40% of standard deviation, so it's a moderate-size gap.

NOTE: Notice how I tend to handle these topics as a scholar should, while actual scholars do not.  I use fairly neutral terms like "ethnocentric" for both blacks and whites, while elite scholars use terms like "black pride" and "racial self-esteem" for blacks, and when the same question is analyzed for whites, terms like "hatred, "racism," "white supremacism," and "hate groups" are used. These "scholars" are frauds and should be ashamed of themselves.

In the last post, we saw saw that Mexican Americans born in the US had a mean IQ that rose from the 1980s to the 2000s, but reversed course since then.  It is currently 91.5. 

That made me curious about other American groups.  Let's start with all whites over the past four decades (GSS Wordsum measure, N = 20, 482):

Mean IQ for whites

1970s    99.2
1980s    99.3 
1990s  100.4
2000s  101.1
2010s  100.6

As we saw with Mex-Ams, whites peaked in the 2000s, but then IQ's dropped in the past decade -- one-half a point.

This is consistent with Greg Cochran's claim that the US is undergoing rapid change in genetic potential for IQ due to intelligent people having fewer offspring.  It might be decreasing one point per generation.

The General Social Survey has been giving participants a vocabulary quiz since the 70s. Research indicates that this is a decent proxy for verbal IQ.

Supposedly, education for blacks in the South was awful prior to the civil rights movement.  If education makes any difference, perhaps IQ scores of southern blacks have gradually improved since the 1960s.  The graph below shows mean IQ per decade for southern (blue line) and northern (red line) blacks (N = 4,435):

Keep in mind that the sample is all adult blacks, so educational improvements for children would have a very gradual impact on the whole adult population, if any at all.  In the 1970s, the gap for the two groups was six IQ points (85 vs. 91). By the 2000s, the gap was down to three points (90 vs. 93).

Notice, too, how the means increased for both groups, especially for southerners, over this period. Perhaps southern schools have gotten better, and some other factor has boosted scores for blacks in both regions.  It could be some biological factor like nutrition, or perhaps something like more exposure to mainstream vocabulary words via television.  I'm pretty sure the same 10 questions have been used since the beginning, so the quiz hasn't gotten easier.

Here is the graph for whites (N = 24,363):

Like blacks, whites from the South gained significant IQ points from the 70's to the 2000s; four points to be specific (96 to 100). Northern whites, on the other hand, only gained 6/10's of a point, from 100.6 to 101.2.

It looks like northern blacks and especially southerners of both races benefited from something.

UPDATE: The South has gotten to be a more attractive region post-civil rights era. Perhaps part of the story is intelligent black and white northerners moving south, thus boosting the mean IQ.

This study shows some evidence for what some contend; that northern Europeans tend to be more intelligent than Mediterranean people. In a recent analysis of General Social Survey data, I found little evidence that IQ varies among whites by which European country your ancestors come from.

As an alternative approach, let's see if there is a correlation between skin tone, as rated by interviewers, and IQ among self-identified whites. Keep in mind IQ is measured with a vocabulary test.

It turns out the the correlation for a sample of 3,162 whites is -.13, meaning there is a slight tendency for pasty whites to be smarter than olive-skinned whites.

Don't accuse me of bias: While my ancestry is 100% northern European, people always ask me if I'm Italian or something. My maternal grandfather was a dead ringer for Vincent Gardenia ("You've got three kinds of pipe").

I recently showed that white Americans whose families are from east of the Hajnal line tend to be more clannish than those from west of the line.

In addition to the issue of clannishness, hbdchick also presented evidence that Western Europeans have a number of positive traits at higher levels than Eastern Europeans. Do these differences hold up in the US?

So far I've seen little evidence that they do. Their mean IQs are not different, nor are their chances of an arrest, nor their frequency of donating blood. The one difference I've detected so far is that W. Europeans are slightly less approving of cheating on their taxes--not even 1/5 of a standard deviation difference.

At least so far, American whites seem fairly homogeneous. European differences seem to have faded.

I recently presented evidence that non-whites tend to be clannish because they are non-white, not because they are outnumbered. But I also mentioned that there is variation among whites. This is consistent with bloggers hbd chick  and JayMan who stress that not all Europeans are the same, and that the Hajnal line divides them.

Using the General Social survey question ("When you think about yourself, how important is your ethnic group membership to your sense of who you are?" 1 = not at all, 2 = slightly, 3 = moderately, 4 = very) I calculated the mean score for various white groups:

When African slaves were first brought to America, they were of course 100% sub-Saharan African. Fast forward to the present day, and gene studies estimate the blacks are, on average, about 20% white.

Black-white interbreeding is common today, and since any mixed raced kids are considered black, white genes flow into the black population today, and they will continue to flow. For how long, I don't know.

If it lasts for hundreds of years, blacks could actually become more than 50% white. They'll be more white than black. This seems to already be the case with Hispanics (more white than American Indian, on average).

Those people who claim that racial mixing will solve the race problem are probably wrong. Many of the most radical blacks or Hispanics are half white or more. Malcolm X, no white lover he, had a lot of white ancestry. Of course, this is the case for Obama, too.

If past trends continue, blacks and whites will be closer and closer genetically, but the conflict will continue.

This meta-analysis of 58 studies documented the "Hispanic Paradox": Latinos are generally healthier and live longer than whites and blacks. To be specific, their rate of dying is 18% lower than that of other Americans.

This kind of finding keeps sociologists up at night because racism by whites is supposed to destroy brown lives, and yet Hispanics outlive whites, and what do people care about more than being alive?

The obvious candidate explanation is that genes are the reason Hispanics live so long, and the authors do manage to write two or three words about the possibility.

Sociologists are also very troubled to find that women live so much longer than men since male oppression, they tell us, absolutely crushes the female soul. And right on time, feminists dream up a million reasons why the sex difference is NOT biological. God forbid we actually develop explanations that fit the data. 

The study also reports that Asians live even longer than Hispanics. But how can any minority overcome the Evil White Man? Not only are Asians non-white, many are non-Christian. And many are immigrants. And we all know Trump's Deplorables--the power structure of this country (ha!)--despise anyone who is not white, Christian, and American.

So, again, how is it possible that Asian Americans are so healthy? How is it that they are so much more educated than the White Devil, and make so much more money than him? Maybe because liberals are 100% delusional, and genes explain these patterns.

A new study finds that several gene variants in African-Americans help explains why they have underweight newborns twice as often as whites. For example, two of the DNA points (single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs) that affect birth weight vary a great deal by race; for one point, 69% of pure Africans carry the weight-lowering version, while only 2% of Europeans have it. For the other point, it was 91% for Africans and 23% for Europeans.

Now the race-deniers tell us that blacks and whites don't differ on genes, but do these percentages seem the same to you?

Next question, why would Africans frequently have genes that make their babies smaller--a trait that predicts health problems down the road?

The honest answer is, I don't know. But this does remind me of Phil Rushton's theory that blacks and whites have different "evolutionary strategies"; that evolutionary pressures have shifted blacks toward a more "quantitative" approach to reproduction, whereas whites and East Asians are shifted toward "quality" offspring--fewer of them, but greater investment in each one. Baby-enlarging genes have supposedly been selected for among whites and Asians.

Whatever the explanation, this study shows strong evidence that black newborns tend to be smaller, not because of some social disadvantage imposed by racist whites, but because of genes and evolutionary differences.    

In Part I, I introduced the idea that blacks and whites differ in how their immune systems react to pathogens, and this is due, in part, to evolution having affected relevant genes.

Here in Part II, I lay out the research evidence summarized in this study. Compared to whites, the immune systems of blacks have a stronger gene response to immune stimulation, especially the genes related to the activation of inflammatory responses. Blacks often have higher frequencies of alleles (i.e., one variety of a gene) associated with stronger proinflammatory responses to infection.

Two studies illustrate this. One tested how macrophages (i.e., a type of large white blood cell) responded to two different types of infections, and the other on monocyte (i.e., another large white blood cell) response to several pathogens such as the human seasonal influenza A virus. On average, 21% of the relevant genes appeared to show different expression between whites and blacks, and 16% of the genes reacting to immune stimulation showed that blacks had a more intense response.

Differences in genes that regulate other genes explain much of the racial difference in immune response. One variant is found in 67% of whites but only 4% of blacks. The authors found that this one difference explained from 27 to 91% of the black-white difference in immune response to various infections.

While the authors write that we have not studied very much the extent to which positive selection has contributed to racial differences in immune response, they cite at least seven studies that report signs that evolutionary pressures have caused the racial differences. Some of the relevant diseases include malaria, African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), celiac disease, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and systemic sclerosis.

The researchers suggest the possibility that there is an "evolutionary conflict between mounting a strong inflammatory response to effectively fight pathogens and avoiding the detrimental consequences of acute and chronic inflammation, which can lead to tissue damage and the development of autoinflammatory and autoimmune diseases."

We have recently learned that 2% of the ancestry of humans outside of Africa is Neanderthal. This may help explain the black-white differences in immune response. Higher levels of Neanderthal admixture can be detected in immune system genes in Europeans and Asians. Regulatory gene variants from Neanderthals have been found to affect the immune responses of Europeans, especially the responses to viruses.

All these racial differences in genes and immune systems are really weird since "race experts" tell us that this race stuff is just an hallucination dreamed up by evil white people.

Here's a figure from a new study that reviews research on racial differences in immune system response. Notice how the regions with the highest abundance of pathogens (disease-causing microorganisms) are the northern half of South America, central sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and southeast Asia.

The graph also traces important moves humans have made over the past 65,000 years, and the right panel shows that people with European ancestry suffer from high rates of death from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, while those with SSA ancestry experience a high incidence of mortality from cardiovascular disease, surgical complications, meningitis, diabetes, septicemia (blood poisoning), kidney inflammation, perinatal death, asthma, childbirth, and HIV.

In the next post, I'll summarize the evidence presented in the study that immune system genes show signs of evolutionary adaptation to the different pathogen environments that races have lived in.

Liberals instruct us that white male privilege is all-powerful and pervasive. Then they compare black and white statistical differences to support their contention. Of course, they are very selective since blacks and other so-called oppressed groups come out ahead all the time.

Take, for instance, brain cancer. This new study of the US between 2000 and 2014 (almost 250k cancer patients were identified) reported that the incidence of glioblastomas--the most common (and very deadly) type of brain cancer--is around 1.5 times higher in men than women. The chart below shows that whites face more than twice the risk of getting a glioblastoma compared to all minority racial groups. (Even Hispanics who identify as white have a significantly lower rate.)

Not only do whites suffer from higher rates of brain cancer, the study concluded they are significantly less likely to survive for 1 or 5 years, so there is no evidence that whites get health care biased in their favor.

If oppression by whites produces these kinds of results for minorities, please God turn me brown!

We saw in the recent post that a statistic, the fixation index, that measures the genetic distance between two populations indicates that Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans are as far apart as wolves and coyotes.

This is a useful comparison because, while it is hard for humans to look at race without bias, who cares about wolves and coyotes?

I looked at Walker's Carnivores of the World to see what is says about these two species. Notice how I used the term species. Canis latrans (coyotes) and Canis lupus (gray wolves). The simple fact that blacks and whites are different as two (closely related) species is stunning. Coyotes and wolves interbreed, but biologists consider them separate species. But let's get specific.

First of all, the two species are obviously similar. Many of the major traits one would think of for one species is true for the other: carnivorous, keen sense of smell, cooperative hunting, etc. The two species live out their lives in very similar ways. So do blacks and whites.

But the two species are for from identical. Wolves are much larger: head and body length are 1,000 to 1,600 mm compared with coyotes at 750-1,000 mm. Wolves' tails are 350 to 560 mm, while those of coyotes are 300-400 mm. Coyotes have a narrower build, proportionally longer ears, and a much narrower snout. At birth, coyotes average 250 grams; for wolves, it's 450 grams. Coyotes appear to reach sexual maturity earlier than wolves, and their maximum longevity is 1.5 years shorter (14.5 vs. 16 years).

You might counter that perhaps they differ physically, but the real question is behavior, and the two behave the same. Not so. Wolves are more social. They run in significantly larger packs, they engage in cooperative hunting more often and on a larger scale, and they target much bigger game. While coyotes focus on rabbits and rodents, wolves don't focus on anything smaller than a beaver. They take down deer, moose, wapiti, caribou, bison, muskox, mountain sheep, etc.

Coyotes focus much more on scavenging. They are more likely to hunt alone or in pairs, and will even partner up with a badger. The coyote uses his superior nose to sniff out a rodent, while the badger uses his superior claws to dig up the meal they split. Coyotes can prey on sheep, but wolves also go after larger animals that are important to humans: cattle and reindeer.

The home range of wolves is much larger: the book reports a maximum of 13,000 sq km for wolves, but only 80 km for coyotes. Wolves need much more space: They can't get more dense than one wolf per 26 sq km while coyotes get as high as 2 per sq km.

You might counter again that behavioral differences in animals may be influenced by genes, but humans are controlled by culture. Over the years, I've read a number of studies on the heritability of animal behavior. It's often been of rodents--not known for their rich culture. I was stunned to learn that human conduct is influenced by genes just as much as that of animals. Heritabilities for animal behavior typically run from .2 to .4. Studies often give heritabilities for humans higher than that.

To see who we are more clearly, we have got to look at ourselves like we look at coyotes and wolves; as animals, plain and simple.

UPDATE: To clarify, I suspect that the environment is not as important for animal behavior as the heritability studies suggest. For both human and animal studies, anything not genetic gets thrown into the environment component, but it likely contains a lot of measurement error, random noise, and other factors that probably cannot be changed like the term "environment" suggests.